Chapel Club

Chapel Club is a London, United Kingdom post-punk and shoegaze group active from 2007 to 2013. The lineup consists of Lewis Bowman on vocals, Michael Hibbert on guitar and keyboards, Alex Parry on guitar, Liam Arklie on bass guitar, and Rich Mitchell on drums.

Formation and early line-up

The band forms in London around St Luke Old Street, where the members meet regularly after rehearsals to talk and drink in the churchyard. Michael Hibbert, who grows up in Essex before moving to London, is the founder and begins shaping the project from a collection of ideas and influences, including natural history illustrations, stop-motion film shorts, guitar lines, drum samples and fragments of melody. Liam Arklie joins after Michael meets Liam, and Alex Parry, Liam’s friend from junior school in Swindon, follows. The final pieces are Rich Mitchell, who is born in Leeds, and Lewis Bowman, a Londoner who has not previously been in bands and begins singing and songwriting for the first time with Chapel Club.

Style and songwriting

The group develops a sound built on dramatic guitars, a tight rhythm section and melodic detail, with Bowman’s vocal style carrying songs about lust, love, loss and other personal tensions. The band’s music is described as difficult to place within existing genres, and Bowman cites influences ranging from Deerhunter and New Order to the Bad Seeds, Scott Walker and Chet Baker. The lyrics draw on writers including Ted Hughes, Mikhail Bulgakov, R.S. Thomas, Frank O’Hara, Ernest Hemingway and Knut Hamsun. Their songs move between direct domestic scenes, darkly poetic writing and more philosophical themes, with examples including O Maybe I, Machine Music, After the Flood, Paper Thin and The Shore.

Live activity and release history

Chapel Club build an audience through early gigs, their first MySpace page and regular London events, often in unusual venues such as a West Indian pub or a disused gallery space. Their live performances are noted for being loud, intense and emotionally charged. The band releases two albums, and splits in October 2013 after the second, Good Together.